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Your name or twitter handle will be printed on a page in the book next to the page number saying 'sponsored by...', plus a signed first edition hardback, ebook edition and your name in the back of the book.
Claim your page by sending James a message on Twitter at @Psythor - and who bets 69 goes first? Nice.

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For the low low price of £125 you can have YOUR banner ad in this book like it's the Internet in 1997. Simply submit your cash and James will get in touch asking for your greyscale JPEG to stick at the top of the page of your choice. Disclaimer: if we don't like the look of your banner ad we'll set dogs on you (we mean negotiate something that works with both of us)

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James will data analyse a topic of your choice and include his findings in the book (topic to be mutually agreed). Plus a signed first edition hardback, ebook edition and your name in the back of the book.

Build a bot

James will build you a bot in the style of @trumpnewyorker which will take your account (or another, subject to negotiation) and match every new tweet with either a New Yorker cartoon or a Matt cartoon.

When does Christmas REALLY begin?
Was 2016 a terrible year for celebrity deaths?
How can we tell what the President is thinking?

Big Stupid Data is a lighthearted compendium of data-driven insights about the world around us. We all know that big data analysis is changing the world but this book isn’t going to tackle important issues, like poverty or climate change. Instead, James O’Malley is going to apply the same analytical rigour to some stupid questions instead.

From using government food inspection data to work out which fast-food chain is the grossest, to mining through 180,000 reviews to work out which films are the most controversial, this book will answer some of the big questions we might never have thought to ask, like, just how often does ITV repeat Shaun of the Dead? Or how many Twitter followers will winning a gold medal at the Olympics earn you?

Inadvertently, some of the silly ideas may also tell us something genuinely useful: Like how the quality of driving in a given country can reveal something about the quality of its government - or how by watching what the Trump family is liking on Twitter, we can get a real handle on what is going on inside the most powerful office in the world.

Essentially, it’d be a fun book for anyone who is a little bit nerdy - think Randall Munroe’s What If? meets Freakonomics

James O’Malley is a writer and journalist covering technology and politics. Since September 2016 he has been Interim Editor of Gizmodo UK, the UK edition of popular tech and culture website Gizmodo and regularly freelances for other outlets on a variety of topics. Since 2014 he has appeared weekly on the BBC Asian Network’s top rated show, The Noreen Khan Show, dispensing technology news and advice to listeners.

Prior and concurrent with this he has written for a wide range of publications including the New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Alphr, TechRadar, T3, E&T, Professional Engineering, Vice, CityMetric, Lifehacker UK, Little Atoms and Politics.co.uk.

Between 2009 and 2014, he was founder and editor of The Pod Delusion, an award-winning weekly science-focused news-magazine podcast. Over the course of its run, the show featured the likes of Sir David Attenborough, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, Hugh Grant, Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Richard Dawkins, Professor Brian Cox and astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield.

He has also created several viral successes. In 2014, his holiday video to Canada gained international attention - it currently has over 600,000 views. In 2016, his tongue-in-cheek London Independence petition in the wake of the EU referendum received over 180,000 signatures and was widely covered by international media. In 2017, he created a Twitter bot - @TrumpsAlert - which uses Twitter data to monitor the follows, unfollows and “likes” of President Trump and his immediate family. It currently has around 60,000 followers and is followed by seemingly every political journalist and writer in America.

He is also a former Weakest Link champion, and was described as “slightly eccentric” by the production team.

Which Films Do Critics Disagree About The Most?
We look to film critics to be an authority on what films are worth seeing, and which we should be miss - but the truth is, sometimes the critics disagree. In fact, sometimes they really disagree. So I wanted to find out, which films are the most controversial amongst critics?

To find out, I downloaded an enormous dataset from popular aggregator Metacritic. It turns out that critics really disagree about the likes of Sin City, Under the Skin and Star Wars Episode III.

This same dataset has also enabled me to dig into other questions: Which films do critical opinions mostly diverge from those of audiences. And which critics are the most contrarian? And which are the best barometers of critical opinion?

I was even able to wade in on the ultimate question by mashing the data up with data from industry website Box Office Mojo: Are box office results affected by bad reviews?

What Can A Country’s Roads Tell Us About Its Government?
Over the last few years there have been a number of big, dense political works of political science, digging into figuring out what really makes countries successful. The likes of Why Nations Fail and Political Order And Political Decay both broadly agree - institutions are key, and that corruption is corrosive to development.

But these are all hard to measure and take a lot of time consuming analysis. Luckily then, I’ve hit upon a useful heuristic for telling just how good a government is: the quality of the roads. Inspired by a haphazard drive around Bucharest, I took data on governance and rule of law and mashed it up data on the number of road deaths - and revealed a surprisingly stark correlation.

Which Fast Food Chain Is The Grossest?
Fast food definitely has a mixed reputation: Sure, it might be just what you need at 1am after a night out, but it also seems reasonable to worry about just where your food is coming from.